For bachelor students we offer German lectures on database systems in addition with paper- or project-oriented seminars. Within a one-year bachelor project students finalize their studies in cooperation with external partners. For master students we offer courses on information integration, data profiling, search engines and information retrieval enhanced by specialized seminars, master projects and advised master theses.

The Web Science group focuses on various topics related to the Web, such as Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Social Network Analysis, Entity Linking, and Recommender Systems. The group is particularly interested in Text Mining to deal with the vast amount of unstructured and semi-structured information available on the Web.

Most of our research is conducted in the context of larger research projects, in collaboration across students, across groups, and across universities. We strive to make available most of our data sets and source code.

Building Scalable Blockchain Applications with Big Data Technology

Advisors

Dr. Alexander Albrecht, Dr. Christoph Böhm

Description

Cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, are omnipresent: In this seminar, we will study the various technologies and concepts that form the core of digital currencies, such as blockchain. In simple terms, a digital currency is based on a globally-distributed database executing transactions in a peer-to-peer environment. Transactions are not administered by a central authority: It is decentralized and based on a distributed consensus protocol that allows peers to execute transactions collectively.

In addition to digital currencies, such a public transaction database opens up many fields of new (revolutionary?) applications not only applying existing blockchain concepts and technologies, but also improve and further enhance them. The topic of this seminar is to identify and use database and big data technologies that can help building such new blockchain applications.

A small selection of emerging applications and use cases around blockchain and bitcoin:

In this course students will pitch similar applications (use cases) with the main objective to draft a public blockchain application based on a peer-to-peer network executing large amount of transactions in a short period of time. Each team, consisting of up to 4 students, must identify at least one challenging blockchain problem within their use case and implement a prototype solving this problem. Solutions need to be evaluated and presented by the team in the course of regular seminar meetings.

Code & documentation (on GitHub). The documentation should contain information on how to execute and evaluate your solution. Furthermore, it should also show strengths and weaknesses of the implementation.

Organization

Project seminar for master students

6 credit points, 4 SWS

Weekly meetings: either as group meetings or individual team meetings with a supervisor